Robot Soccer by Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles

Our team which has its "home" in the UWA mobile robot lab was named
after the new and successful Perth
Glory soccer team. The heart of the robots are the the
EyeBot controllers, developed by a
team around Thomas Braunl. We use a Motorola 68332 32-bit controller,
which offer a variety of digital/analog I/O facilities. We developed
our own operating system RoBIOS for the systems, which allows a great
deal of flexibility. I.e. the same EyeBot system is also used for
6-legged and biped walking machines, and - as a boxed version - for
undergraduate courses in assembly language.

We incorporated a digital color camera and a graphics display. All
image processing is done on-board. Our robots have local intelligence
and are not simple pawns, directed by a central system with global
vision. Although our approach is clearly disadvanted in respect of
winning a RoboCup competition,
we are more interested in research on general purpose intelligent
agents, as opposed to building a system which serves only a certain
competition and has to rely on global sensors.

Each robot has shaft encoders and infrared range sensors in
addition to a digital color camera. We are currently incorporating
wireless transmissions to allow the robots to talk to each other plus
a ball kicking device. We are able to operate even without
communication betwen the robots. Each robot will be told its starting
position and will use its shaft encoders to keep track of its current
position. However, communication will allow much more sophisticated
behaviours like passing a ball to another robot.